Between Song and Story ― Essays for the 21st Century

Between Song and Story celebrates the contemporary essay's capacity to live between the two worlds of lyric and narrative. The editors have sought to capture that duality in this anthology, a collection of writings that exemplifies the diverse, exuberant, and intrepid forms of the contemporary essay. Designed for use in any writing course focusing on the craft of the essay, the anthology includes healthy selections of lyric and formally adventurous essays, as well as those focused on nature and travel writing, and more nuanced explorations of place. This anthology tells a rich story about the wealth of experimentation and diversity of approaches to the essay in the twenty-first century. Readers will be engaged and surprised.

SHERYL ST. GERMAIN currently directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Chatham University where she also teaches poetry and creative nonfiction. Her work has received several awards, including two NEA Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, and most recently the William Faulkner Award for the personal essay. Her books include Going Home, The Mask of Medusa, Making Bread at Midnight, How Heavy the Breath of God, and The Journals of Scheherazade. A book of lyric essays, Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman, was published in 2003. Her most recent book is Let It Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems, published in 2007. Margaret Whitford has a background in community development finance and organizational development. After earning an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania s Wharton School, she spent nearly twenty years in the not-for-profit field before returning to graduate school for an MFA in Creative Writing. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the anthology Good Dogs Doing Good, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, MARY Magazine, and Brevity. She is the winner of the 2011 Best Writing award from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania.